Posts Tagged ‘Gulf States’

(JNi.media) The UAE government says it does not plan to change its relationship with Israel any time soon, despite Israel’s announcement of opening its first official diplomatic mission in the UAE, associated with the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), headquartered in Abu Dhabi, 7 Days reported.

The UAE Foreign Ministry’s Director of Communications Maryam Al Falasi said on Friday: “The International Renewable Energy Agency is an international, independent agency that works according to the laws, regulations and norms that govern the work of such organizations. Any agreement between IRENA and Israel does not represent any change in the position of the UAE or its relations with Israel.”

The UAE does not recognize the state of Israel, and Al Falasi stated that missions accredited to IRENA are limited to dealings with agency business, nothing more.

“They do not, under any circumstances, cover any other activities and do not involve any obligation upon the host country with regards to its diplomatic relations or any other relations,” she said.

A statement issued by IRENA on Friday said that under its own agreement with UAE, signed back in 2013, the Gulf State host is responsible for facilities and services to ensure the proper functioning of the agency. “The headquarters agreement grants all IRENA members the right to establish permanent missions accredited to the agency, to strengthen the global platform it is creating for cooperation in the field of renewable energy,” the statement said.

The IRENA statement added: “Israel is a member of the agency. Under the agreement, the work of member missions is confined to engagement with the agency in implementation of its work program focused on the uptake of renewable energy, and bears no implication on the relation between the member of IRENA and the host country.”

Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama dreamed about a “new Middle East” under the leadership of the United States. They were dead wrong.

They may have fantasized that they could make peace between Israel and Sunni Muslim states, the foremost being Saudi Arabia, but their worst nightmares did not envision such an alliance being formed in opposition to none other than the United States.

Dore Gold, director of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and former Ambassador to the United Nations, finally spelled out on Wednesday what Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has whispered for months. The Muslims and the Jews have two common problems. One is an enemy, meaning Iran, which threatens to rule an Islamic Caliphate with or without a nuclear weapon.

The other problem is the Obama administration, which is appeasing the enemy.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has stated several times that Israel and Saudi Arabia have a common interest in making sure that Iran does reach nuclear weapons capability. Gold went a lot farther in his message last night to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Referring to Iran, he said:

What we have is a regime on a roll that is trying to conquer the Middle East and it’s not Israel talking, that is our Sunni Arab neighbors — and you know what? I’ll use another expression – that is our Sunni Arab allies talking.

Allies?

What happened to the “unshakeable bond” between the United States and Israel? It is there as long as people believe it. An era does not in a day, and American Jews will believe in that “unshakeable bond” for a long time to come because it makes them feel good.

And isn’t it President Barack Obama who is ready help arm Israel once again, after having forced it to be armed to the teeth by surrendering to many of Iran’s terms in his ObamaDeal, which Israel and the Sunni Arabs are certain is nothing more than a well-paved diplomatic road to hell?

Americans are too far away from the shores of the Middle East to feel the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran the way Jews in Israel and Muslims in the Gulf States feel it.

If Israel and its “allies” were to get it through the State Dept.’s thick skull that a nuclear-armed Iran is no less of a threat to the United States that it is to the United States, perhaps Americans would worry a bit more about Tehran and less about Mexican immigrants, homosexual marriages and Donald Trump.

Gold was upbeat, or at least tried to sound that way, about future relations between Israel and the United States in the likely event that Congress will not be able to ditch ObamaDeal.

He said:

We will find a practical way to come up with solutions to a very dangerous situation. But in the meantime we have to tell what we think about this agreement. We have to say the truth even though it’s unpleasant.

It also may be very unpleasant for President Obama amid his successor to realize that their influence in the Middle East is dwindling. President Obama was overjoyed at the Arab Spring rebellions for “democracy,” which in the Muslim Middle East means “anarchy” and which was the reality for too long a time in Libya, Yemen, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. Iraq is a lost cause.

Obama may have reached out Muslims, but he grabbed a handful of radical Islam that now threatens more than half the world.

He, like most other American politicians, assumes that Israel has no choice but to rely on the “unshakeable bond” with the United States.

The White House has vehemently denied charges that President Barack Obama literally turned his back on Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi at the G7 summitt in Germany this week.

GulfNews.com posted a video showing Abadi sitting down on a bench where President Obama was talking with two other leaders. Obama’s back was turned to Abadi. The President continued to talk as if the newcomer didn’t exist, but it obviously was not intentional since the Iraqi leader approached the bench in the middle of the conservation.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that anyone looking at the scene and concluding that Obama was snubbing Abadi is “telegraphing some insecurities that date back to junior high.”

Earnest obviously is right, as the video below shows, but the Arab reaction makes it clear that despite its being sensitive, ego-centric and arrogant, it also interprets every word and body language of President Obama as a slur against Arabs.

When Obama “reached out Muslims” in Cairo in 2009, he did not realize whom he was dealing with.

Saudi Arabia has been joined by other oil-rich states, including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the Gulf States, all of whom said that “they “have decided to answer the call of President Hadi to protect Yemen and his people from the aggression of the Huthi militia.”

Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Morocco and Sudan also “expressed desire to participate in the operation,” according to the official Saudi news agency. Egypt said it is ready to provide air and naval power and even foot soldiers, if necessary.

Abbas’ statement lines him up with the ruling Sunni Muslims who fear a Shi’ite Muslim takeover in Yemen will strengthen Iran’s aim at ruling the Middle East.

The giant HarperCollins publishing firm has wiped Israel off the maps in its English-language atlases it sells in the Middle East — because showing its existence would be “unacceptable.”

The maps clearly show Syria, although it is questionable if that country really exists anymore, and Jordan reaching to the Mediterranean Sea, where Israel apparently has disappeared.

HarperCollins explained that “local preferences” of the Gulf State countries took precedence over including Israel on the map, something their Arab customers found “unacceptable.”

The original textbooks, showing that Israel indeed exists, were discovered by customs officials in an unnamed Gulf country. They allowed the books in the country only after the maps were corrected by hand.

Saudi Arabia suggested in 2002 that the Arab League would “normalize” relations with Israel if it simply would take measures to prepare for the demographic elimination of a Jewish State of Israel by accepting a few million foreign Arabs after surrendering all of the land from which seven Arab countries tried to annihilate the country in 1967.

Of course, doing so would make relieve the Arab countries of having to recognize because the country would be unrecognizable, except under a new name, such as the Palestinian Authority.

The Arab countries never recognized Israel even in 1948, when they tried to destroy Israel before it was day old. Egypt and Jordan since have signed peace treaties, but no other Arab state has dared to follow suit.

It is known that Arab countries uses millions of products made in Israel, from generic medicine made by Teva Pharmaceuticals to computer chips made by Intel’s operations in the country, and even ZIM containers.

Perhaps every single product from Israel should be stamped with an Israeli map and the word “Israel” and we will see if the customs officials will deny their entry.

Israel and the Gulf States may not agree about issues regarding the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and how to deal with Arab terrorism — but everyone in the region worries about how to stop Iran from creating a nuclear weapon.

Iran has declined to respond to questions from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency about its nuclear program’s “possible military dimensions.” IAEA chief Yukiya Amano warned on Friday, “We cannot provide assurance that all [nuclear] material [in Iran] is for peaceful purposes… What’s needed now is action,” he added.

“Iran’s refusal to disclose its nuclear past casts a heavy shadow over the future,” Steinitz said bluntly. “Amano’s grave words indicate, in fact, Iran’s first violation of the interim nuclear agreement [of last November.] Signing a final agreement under these conditions would be a reckless act that world powers must avoid.

The prospect of achieving any concrete progress towards that goal by the November 24 deadline for a diplomatic deal is dim at best in any case.

“Failure to conclude a solid agreement that prevents nuclear proliferation could have serious consequences, not only in our region, but far beyond,” commented Answar Gargash, United Arab Emirates minister of state for foreign affairs over the weekend. “We must consider it crucial that any future agreement with Iran on the nuclear file be air-tight.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said the same for years, noted Defense News, quoting his oft-repeated warning, “No deal is better than a bad deal.”

Emily Landau, senior research fellow and head of the Arms Control and Regional Security Program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv is equally direct.

On October 29, Landau told Defense News, “Now is the time to apply massive pressure. I hope at some point the international community will wake up to the fact that Iran has absolutely no interest in getting a good deal.”

U.S. officials don’t seem to be getting the message, however.

Even when a former American diplomat who has dealt with Iran in the past is the one delivering the news.

Dennis Ross led State Department talks with Iran under former President George H.W. Bush. He has urged the West to resist giving in to Iranian pressure for concessions in order to ensure that some deal is closed.

“It’s no accident that hardly anyone involved inthe Iranian nuclear negotiations has expressed optimism about meeting the November 24 deadline,” Ross wrote in an analysis for the Oct. 16 edition of Foreign Affairs. He listed numerous concessions already won by Iran in talks with the West, simply by holding out and continuing with negotiations, despite numerous ongoing violations.

Whether the Obama administration will hold firm and put the brakes on the current bleed taking place on the sanctions formerly imposed on Iran is anyone’s guess. But unless international powers reassert their authority and put the economic bite back into the sanctions that were already approved by the United Nations and their individual governments, it will soon be too late to do very much at all.

Secretary of State John Kerry, after meeting with Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas in London, said that “a final status agreement [between the Israelis and the Palestinians] is important in enhancing regional security and stability throughout the Middle East” (‘Kerry pledges to peace talks during Abbas meeting,’ Breitbart, September 9, 2013).

“Secretary Kerry’s statement is utter nonsense. If the history of recent years — and indeed of the entire 65-year long period of the Arab war on Israel — has made one thing clear, it is that the lack of a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians is manifestly not the cause of the Middle East’s conflicts, violence and bloodshed.

In fact, it is totally unrelated and irrelevant to the present violence and conflict in Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iraq and Yemen. If Israel didn’t exist, the same problems between and within Arab countries would still exist.

Consider: The Syrian regime of Bashar Assad has killed approximately one hundred thousand people in a war with Sunni Islamist rebels, who have also slaughtered tens of thousands. Massive instability and brutal violence is afflicting Egypt. Yemen has been wracked by internal conflict and thousands have been killed. Libya has become a jungle of jihadist warriors since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. In Iraq, over 5,000 people have been slaughtered in virtually daily suicide bombings just this year. Thousands of Christians have been murdered and many dozens of churches destroyed in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere. Not one of these conflicts has anything to do with the Israeli/Palestinian Arab issue.

Historically, the war waged by Arabs on Israel has had little to do with the numerous other conflagrations besetting the region.

In the 1950s, it had no bearing on the Algerian war.

In the 1960s, it had no bearing on the Egyptian invasion of Yemen, or the bloody emergence of the Ba’athist dictatorship in Iraq, or the Aden (now Yemen) Emergency in which hundreds were killed in violence.

In the 1970s, it had nothing to do with the Libyan-Chad war.

In the 1980s, it had nothing to do with the Iran-Iraq war, in which over a million people were killed.

In the 1990s, it had nothing to do with Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait — though Saddam Hussein absurdly linked them.

(A personal note: I was among heads of American Jewish organizations flown to Qatar in the late 1990s by the Emir of Qatar, who pleaded with us to urge the U.S. Congress to protect Qatar from a feared Saudi Arabia/United Arab Emirates invasion. This feared conflict — in which Arabs appealed to pro-Israel Jews for help — had nothing to do with Israel).

It is not in the national interests of the United States for American officials to go around the world falsely stating that the “Arab-Israeli conflict” (which is actually, purely and simply, an Arab war on Israel’s very existence) is the core of the Middle East’s problems and that solving it is the key to regional stability. Not only is it not the core, it isn’t even a factor.

First, it is nonsense.

Second, obtaining an Israeli/Palestinian peace agreement, even if one could, would not solve other regional problems, which are rooted in the region’s ideological and religious pathologies.

Third, the mis-focus on the Israeli/Palestinian divide skews American priorities — as it is doing right now. How can Secretary Kerry make such an absurd statement when Syria is exploding and the region is wracked by violence and instability due to nothing connected to Israel or the Palestinians?

The alleged Israeli/Palestinian “peace process” has become an obsessive fetish which squanders American resources, credibility and standing. Why should the U.S. talk up a bogus peace process that is not going to deliver? Why should it accept the blame for the inevitable failure?